Architectural quality criteria for hospital information systems.

An important part of hospital information systems (HIS) evaluation is the quality assessment of its architecture, i.e. the structure of its IT infrastructure. Therefore, quantitative architectural quality criteria are needed. On the basis of relevant architectural components of a HIS defined by 3LGM2, the following quality criteria were defined: functional redundancy, functional under-saturation, functional correspondence, informational redundancy, degree of heterogeneity and degree of computer-support. These quality criteria were implemented as part of the 3LGM2 tool, a modelling tool to create 3LGM2 conformant HIS models. For every 3LGM2 model and its components the relevant quality criteria are automatically calculated and presented. The defined quality criteria can be used for several information management purposes. Nevertheless they are not intended to make absolute statements about the HIS quality. To ensure their expressiveness, complete and consistent underlying 3LGM2 models are needed.